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SPEECH

OF LORD BROUGHAM ON PARLIAMENTARY REFORM, DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS, OCTOBER 7, 1831.

INTRODUCTION.

EARL GREY came into power November 22d, 1830, being the first Whig minister since the days of Lord Grenville in 1806-7. His life had been devoted to parliamentary reform, and he made this the leading object of his administration.

Ages had passed away since the apportionment of members for the House of Commons. The popula tion of England had five-folded. Many of the largest towns in the kingdom, such as Liverpool, Manchester, &c., had sprung into existence, and were without representatives; while a large number of places, sending two members each to Parliament, had sunk into mere villages or hamlets, and some, like Old Sarum, Gatton, &c., were actually left without an inhabitant. These places passed into the hands, or under the control, of the nobility and men of wealth, so that seats in the House of Commons, by scores upon scores, were bought and sold in the market. When Lord Grey first took up the subject in 1793, he offered to prove that seventy-one peers, by direct nomination or influence, returned one hundred and sixty-three members, and ninety-one commoners one hundred and thirty-nine members. Thus, in England and Wales (exclusive of the forty-five for Scotland), three hundred and two members, being a decided majority of the Commons, were returned by one hundred and sixty-two individuals! These statements made a deep impression on the public mind; but such was the dread inspired by the French Revolution and its misguided friends in England, and such the reluctance of the higher classes to part with power, that every attempt at reform was instantly voted down, until 1830, when Earl Grey came into power.

On the first of March, 1831, the new ministry brought forward their Reform Bill in the House of Commons. It was designed to meet three evils: first, the appointment of members by individuals; secondly, the small number of voters in most boroughs and in the counties; and, thirdly, the expenses of elections. To meet the first evil, it proposed that sixty boroughs, enumerated in a schedule marked A, having each a population under two thousand, should be totally disfranchised; and that forty-seven others, in a schedule marked B, with a like population under four thousand, should each be allowed only one member. Weymouth, which sent four members, was to have but two. In this way, one hundred and sixty-eight vacancies would be created, which might be supplied by giving representatives to the large towns, and by increasing the number of county members. In respect to the second evil, it proposed to give the right of voting in boroughs to all householders paying a £10 rent, and in the counties to copyholders of £10 a year, and to leaseholders of £50 a year. In regard to the third evil, that of election expenses, it disfranchised all non-resident electors, thus saving vast sums paid for their transportation to the polls; and shortened the duration of elections by increasing the facilities for receiving votes.

This bill was debated in the Commons with great ability on both sides for seven weeks, and was finally rejected by a majority of eight. The ministry immediately tendered their resignations, but the King (William IV.), who was in favor of reform, refused to accept them; he preferred to dissolve Parlia ment, and refer the question to the decision of the people in a new House of Commons. The elections, in all places where the popular voice could prevail, went strongly for the bill, eighty of the county members being chosen under pledges to vote for reform.

The bill, with some slight modifications, was brought again into the House on the 24th of June, 1831. Here it was debated under various forms for nearly three months, and was finally passed on the 19th of September, by a majority of one hundred and six. It was now carried to the House of Lords, a large majority of whom were known to be bitterly opposed to the measure. The great body of the nation were equally resolved it should pass; petitions came in by thousands from every part of the kingdom; and the feeling seemed to be almost universal, "through Parliament or over Parliament, this measure must be carried."

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In this state of the public mind, the House of Lords took up the subject on the 3d of October, 1831, and discussed it in a debate of five nights, which, "for skill, force, and variety of argument; for historical, constitutional, and classical information," says an able writer, "was never surpassed." Lord Brougham reserved himself until the fifth night; and after Lord Eldon had spoken with all the weight of his age and authority against the bill, the Lord Chancellor came down from the wool-sack to reply. His speech was intended as an answer to all the important arguments which had been urged against reform during this protracted discussion. He began in a mild and conciliatory manner, unwilling to injure his cause by the harshness in which he too commonly indulged, and answered a part of the arguments in a strain of good-humored wit and pleasantry which has rarely been surpassed. But after repeated interruptions

some of them obviously designed to put him down, he changed his tone, and spoke for nearly three hours more with a keenness of rebuke, a force of argument, and a boldness of declamation which secured him a respectful hearing, and extorted the confession from his adversary Lord Lyndhurst, that a more powerful speech of the kind had never been delivered in the House of Lords.

speaker in ap

SPEECH, &c.

to the task before me; but cheered, on the other hand, with the intimate and absolute persuasion that I have no personal interest to serve-no sinister views to resist-that there is nothing in my nature or in my situation which can cast even the shadow of a shade across the broad path, I will not say of legislative, but of judicial duty, in which I am now to accompany your Lordships.

have spoken

bill.

MY LORDS, I feel that I owe some apology to your Lordships for standing in the way of any noble Lords' who wish to address you; but after much deliberation, and after consulting with several of my noble friends on both sides of the House, it did appear to us, as I am sure it will to your Lordships, desirable, on many grounds, that the debate should be brought to a close this night; and I thought I could not better contribute to that end than by taking the present opportunity of addressing you. Indeed, I had Anxiety of the scarcely any choice. I am urged on proaching the by the anxiety I feel on this mighty subject. subject, which is so great that I should hardly have been able to delay the expression of my opinion much longer; if I had, I feel assured that I must have lost the power to address you. This solicitude is not, I can assure your Lordships, diminished by my recollection of the great talents and brilliant exertions of those by whom I have been preceded in the discussion, and the consciousness of the difficulties with which I have to contend in following such men. It is a deep sense of these difficulties that induces me to call for your patient indulgence. For, although not unused to meet public bodies, nay, constantly in the habit, during many years, of presenting myself before great assemblies of various kinds, yet I do solemnly assure you that I never, until this moment, felt what deep responsibility may rest on a member of the Legislature in addressing either of its Houses. And if I, now standing with your Lordships on the brink of the most momentous decision that ever human assembly came to at any period of the world, and seeking to arrest you while it is yet time, in that position could, by any divination of the future, have foreseen in my earliest years that I should live to appearing your time were I once more to refute them; here, and to act as your adviser, on a question of such awful importance, not only to yourselves, but to your remotest posterity, I should have deThe prepara voted every day and every hour of tion he would that life to preparing myself for the

wish to have

made.

task which I now almost sink undergathering from the monuments of ancient experience the lessons of wisdom which might guide our course at the present hour-looking abroad on our own times, and these not uneventful, to check by practice the application of those lessons-chastening myself, and sinking within me every infirmity of temper, every waywardness of disposition which might by possibility impede the discharge of this most solemn duty; but above all, eradicating from my mind every thing that, by any accident, could interrupt the most perfect candor and impartiality of judgment. I advance thus anxious and thus humbled The Marquess of Cleveland and several others had risen and given way.

I have listened, my Lords, with the most profound attention, to the debate on this Answer to question, which has lasted during the those who five past days; and having heard a against the vast variety of objections brought against this measure, and having also attended to the arguments which have been urged to repel those objections, I, careless whether I give offense in any quarter or no, must, in common fairness, say, on the one hand, that I am so far moved by some of the things which I have heard urged, as to be inclined toward the reconsideration of several matters on which I had conceived my mind to be fully made up; and, on the other, that in the great majority of the objections which have been ingeniously raised against this bill, I can by no means concur; but viewing them as calmly and dispassionately as ever man listened to the arguments advanced for and against any measure, I am bound by a sense of duty to say, that those objections have left my mind entirely unchanged as to the bulk of the principles upon which the bill is framed. If I presumed to go through those objections, or even through the majority of them, in detail, I should be entering upon a tedious and also a superfluous work; so many of them have been removed by the admirable speeches which you have already heard, that I should only be wast

I should only be doing worse what my precur sors have already done far better. I will begin, however, with what fell from a noble Earl [Earl Dudley] with whose display I was far (1) Lord less struck than others, because I was Dudley. more accustomed to it-who, viewing this bill from a remote eminence, and not coming close, or even approaching near, made a reconnoissance of it too far off to see even its outworks -who, indulging in a vein of playful and elegant pleasantry, to which no man listens in private with more delight than myself, knowing how well it becomes the leisure hours and familiar moments of my noble friend, delivered with the utmost purity of diction, and the most felicitous aptness of allusion-I was going to say a discourse-but it was an exercise or essay-of the highest merit, which had only this fault, that it was an essay or exercitation on some other thesis, and not on this bill. It was as if some one had set to my noble friend, whose accom

assumes the

issue.

plishments I know-whose varied talents I admire. but in whom I certainly desiderate soundness of judgment and closeness of argument-a theme de rebuspublicis, or de motû civium, or de novarum rerum cupiditate-on change, on democracies, on republicanism, on anarchy; and on these interesting but somewhat trite and even threadbare subjects, my noble friend made one of the most lucid, most terse, most classical, and, as far as such efforts will admit of eloquence, most eloquent exercitations that ever proceeded His argument from mortal pen. My noble friend very point at proceeded altogether on a false assumption; it was on a fiction of his own brain, on a device of his own imagination, that he spoke throughout. He first assumed that the bill meant change and revolution, and on change and revolution he predicted voluminously and successfully. So much for the critical merits of his performance; but, practically viewed, regarded as an argument on the question before us, it is to be wholly left out of view; it was quite beside the matter. If this bill be change and be revolution, there is no resisting the conclusions of my noble friend. But on that point I am at issue with him; and he begins by taking the thing in dispute for granted. I deny that this bill is change, in the bad sense of the word; nor does it lead to, nor has it any connection with revolution, except so far as it has a direct tendency to prevent revolution.

My noble friend, in the course of his essay, His charges talked to you of this administration as ministry as one prone to change; he told you that being eager its whole system was a system of

against the

for innova

tion,

changes; and he selected as the first change on which he would ring a loud peal, that which he said we had made in our system of finance. If he is so averse to our making alterations in our scheme of finance the very first year we have been in office, what does he think, I ask, of Mr. Pitt's budgets, of which never one passed without undergoing changes in almost every one tax, besides those altogether abandoned? If our budget had been carried as it was originally brought in, with a remission of the timber duty, and the candle duty, and the coal duty, it would have been distinguished beyond all others only as having given substantial relief to the people on those very trivial and unnecessary articles, I suppose, of human life-fire, and light, and lodging. Then, our law reform is another change which my noble friend charged the government with being madly bent on effecting. Scarcely had the Lord President of the Council risen to answer the objection raised against us on this score, than up started my noble friend to assert that he had not pressed any such objection into his service. My Lords, I am not in the habit of taking a note of what falls from any noble Lord in debate-it is not my practice but by some fatality it did so happen that, while my noble friend was speaking, I took a note of his observations, of which I will take the liberty 2 Concerning public affairs, or civil commotions, or the love of political change

as regard

ciect 10

of reading you the very first line. "Change and revolution; all is change; among the firstlaw." I took that note, because I was somewhat surprised at the observation, knowing, as I did, that this law reform had met with the approbation of my noble friend himself; and, what was yet more satisfactory to my mind, it had received the sanction of your Lordships, and had been passed through all its stages without even a division. My noble friend then told us, still reconnoitering our position at a distance, or, at most, partaking in an occasional skirmish, but holding himself aloof from the main battle-he told us that this bill came recommended neither by the weight of ancient authority nor by the spirit of modern refinement; that of a this attack on our present system was thority, not supported by the experience of the past, nor sanctioned by any appearance of the great mind of the master genius of our precursors in later times. As to the weight of ancient authority, skilled as my noble friend is in every branch of literary history, I am obliged to tell him he is inaccurate; and, because it may afford him some consolation in this his day of discomfiture and anguish, I will supply the defect which exists in his historical recollections; for an author, the first of satirists in any age-Dean Swift, with whom my noble friend must have some sympathy, since he closely imitates him in this respect, that as the Dean satirized, under the name of man, a being who had no existence save in his own imagination, so my noble friend attacks, under the name of the bill, a fancy of his own, a creature of his fertile brain, and which has no earthly connection with the real ink and parchment bill before you-Dean Swift, who was never yet represented as a man prone to change, who was not a Radical, who was not a Jacobin (for, indeed, those terms were in his day unknown)— Dean Swift, who was not even a Whig, but, in the language of the times, a regular, stanch, thick-and-thin Tory, while enumerating the absurdities in our system, which required an adequate and efficient remedy, says: It is absurd that the boroughs, which are decayed, and destitute both of trade and population, are not extinguished" (or, as we should say, in the language of the bill, which was as unknown to Dean Swift as it is now to my noble friend, put into schedule A.), "because,” adds the Dean, they return members who represent nobody at all;" so here he adopts the first branch of the measure; and next he approves of the other great limb, for the second grand absurdity which he remarks is, "that several large towns are not represented, though they are filled with those who increase mightily the trade of the realm." Then as to shortening the duration of Parliaments, on which we have not introduced a single provision into the bill-if we had, what a cry should we have heard about the statesmen in Queen Anue's day, the great men who lived in the days of Blenheim, and during the period sung of by my noble friend, from Blenheim to Waterloo; how we should have been taunted with the Somerses

an answer would be very unreasonable; for, he
asks, ingeniously enough, how can the guests
dress a dinner, especially when they have not
possession of the kitchen?
But did it never
strike him that the present is not the case of
guests called upon to eat a dinner; it is one of
rival cooks who want to get into our kitchen.
We are here all on every side cooks—a synod
of cooks (to use Dr. Johnson's phrase), and noth-
ing but cooks; for it is the very condition of our

and Godolphins, and their cotemporaries, the Swifts and the Addisons! What would they have said of such a change? Yet what did the same Dean Swift, the cotemporary of Somers and Godolphin, the friend of Addison, who sang the glories of Blenheim, the origin of my noble friend's period-what did the Dean, inspired by all the wisdom of ancient times, say to shortening the duration of Parliaments? "I have a strong love for the good old fashion of Gothic Parliaments, which were only of one year's du-being-the bond of our employment under a comration." Such is the ground, such the vouchers, upon the authority of which my noble friend, in good set phrase, sets the weight of ancient wisdom against the errors of the Reformers, and triumphs in the round denial that we have any thing in our favor like the sanction of authority; and it turns out, after all, that the wise men of the olden time promulgated their opinions on the subject in such clear, and decisive, and vigorous terms, that if they were living in our days, and giving utterance to the same sentiments, they would be set down rather for determined Radicals than for enemies of reform.

mon master-that none of us shall ever taste the dishes we are dressing. The Commons House may taste it; but can the Lords? We have nothing to do but prepare the viands. It is, therefore, of primary importance, when the authority of the two classes of rival artists is the main question, to inquire what are our feats severally in our common calling. I ought, perhaps, to ask your Lordships' pardon for pursuing my noble friend's allegory; but I saw that it produced an impression by the cheers it excited, and I was desirous to show that it was in a most extraordinary degree inapplicable to the question, to illustrate which it was fetched from afar off. I, therefore, must think myself entitled to ask who and what be they that oppose us, and what dish they are likely to cook for us, when once again they get possession of the kitchen? I appeal to any candid man who now hears me, and I ask him whether, it being fair to consider who are the authors of the bill, it is not equally fair to consider from whom the objections come? I, therefore, trust that any impartial man, unconnected with either class of statesmen, when called upon to consider our claims to confidence before he adopts our measures, should, before he repudiates us in favor of our adversaries, inquire, Are they likely to cure the evils and remedy the defects, of which they admit the existence in our system? and are their motives such as ought to win the confidence of judicious and calmly reflecting men?

(2) Lord

Then my noble friend, advancing from forand as desti- mer times to our own, asked who and tute of talent, what they are that form the cabinet of the day? To such questions it would be unbecoming in me to hazard a reply. I do not find fault with my noble friend for asking them; I admit that it is fair to ask who are they that propound any measure, especially when it comes in the shape of a great change. The noble Earl then complained of our poverty of genius-absence of commanding talents-want of master minds and even our destitution of eloquence, a topic probably suggested by my noble friend's [Lord Grey] display, who opened the debate, and whose efforts in that kind are certainly very different from those which the noble Earl seems to admire. But if it be a wise rule to ask by whom a measure is propounded before you give it implicit confidence, it certainly can not be an unwise rule to ask, on the other hand, who and One noble Lord [Lord Winchelsea] there is what be they by whom that measure is resisted, whose judgment we are called upon imbefore you finally reject it on their bare author- plicitly to trust, and who expressed him- Winchelsea. ity. Nor can I agree with a noble friend of self with much indignation, and yet with entire mine [Lord Caernarvon], who spoke last night, honesty of purpose, against this measure. No and who laid down one doctrine on man is, in my opinion, more single-hearted; no passing on an this subject at which I marveled great- man more incorruptible. But in his present enLord Caernar ly. It was one of his many allego-mity to this bill, which he describes as pregnant ries for they were not metaphors, with much mischief to the Constitution, he gives nor yet similes -some of them, indeed, were me reason to doubt the soundness of the resoluendless, especially when my noble friend took to tion which would take him as a guide, from the the water, and embarked us on board of his ship fact of his having been not more than five or six -for want of steam, I thought we should never months ago most friendly to its provisions, and have got to the end of our voyage. When we expressed the most unbounded confidence in the reply to their arguments against our measure, by government which proposed it. Ought not this asking what reform they have got of their own to make us pause before we place our consciento offer, he compares us to some host, who, hav- ces in his keeping-before we surrender up our ing placed before his friends an uneatable din- judgment to his prudence-before we believe in ner, which they naturally found fault with, should his cry that the bill is revolution, and His self-contrasay, "Gentlemen, you are very hard to please; the destruction of the empire-when diction. I have set a number of dishes before you which we find the same man delivered diametrically you can not eat; now, what dishes can you dress opposite opinions only six months ago? yourselves ?" My noble friend says that such

Remarks in

von.

Lord Winchelsea here shouted out "No."

Proof.

46

The Lord Chancellor. Then I have been prac-ing around him on all sides-surveying what had ticed upon, if it is not so; and the noble occurred in the last forty or fifty years-glancEarl's assertion should be of itself sufficient ing above him and below him, around him and to convince me that I have been practiced on. behind him-watching every circumstance of the But I can assure the noble Earl that this has been past-anticipating every circumstance of the fuhanded to me as an extract from a speech which ture-scanning every sign of the times-taking he made to a meeting of the county of Kent, held into his account all the considerations upon which at Maidstone, on the 24th of last March: "They a lawgiver ought to reckon-regarding also the have not got reform yet; but when the measure wishes, the vehement desires, not to say absolute does come, as I am persuaded it will come, into demands, of the whole country for some immethe law of the land-" (a loud cry of No," diate reform-concentrates all his wisdom in this from the opposition Lords). Then, if noble Lords proposition-the result, the practical result of ali will not let me proceed quietly, I must begin his deliberations, and all his lookings about, and again, and this time I will go further back. The all his scannings of circumstances the whole speech represents the noble Earl to have said, produce of his thoughts, by the value of which "His Majesty's government is entitled to the you are to try the safety of his counsels-namethanks of the country. Earl Grey, with his dis- ly, that you should suspend all your operations tinguished talents, unites a political honesty not on this bill for two years, and, I suppose, two to be surpassed, and leaves behind him, at an days, to give the people-what? breathing time. immeasurable distance, those who have aban- The noble Lord takes a leaf out of the book of doned their principles and deceived their friends. the noble Duke near him—a leaf, which I beThe noble Lord is entitled to the eternal grati- lieve the noble Duke himself would now wish tude of his country for the manner in which he canceled. The noble Duke, shortly before he has brought forward this question. I maintain proposed the great measure of Catholic emancithat he deserves the support of the country at pation, had said, Before I can support that large." And, my Lords, the way in which I was measure, I should wish that the whole question practiced on to believe that all this praise was might sink into oblivion." But the proposition not referable to the timber duties, but to reform, of the noble Earl, though based on the same idea, I shall now explain. It is in the next passage goes still further. Bury," says he, "this of the same speech: "They have not got reform measure of reform in oblivion for two years and yet; but when the measure does come, as I am two days, and then see, good people, what I will persuaded it will come, into the law of the land, do for you." And then what will the noble it will consolidate, establish, and strengthen our Lord do for the good people? Why, nothingglorious Constitution; and not only operate for neither more nor less than nothing. We, innothe general welfare and happiness of the country, cents that we were, fancied that the noble Lord but will also render an act of justice to the great must, after all his promises, really mean to do and influential body of the people. The meas- something; and thought that he had said someure has not yet been introduced to that House of what of bribery-of doing a little about bribery which I am a member." (Lord Winchelsea and his friends here cheered loudly.) Ay, but it had been debated in the House of Commons for near a month it had been published in all books, pamphlets, and newspapers—it had been discussed in all companies and societies-and I will undertake to assert that there was not one single man in the county of Kent who did not know that Lord John Russell's bill was a bill for parliamentary reform. The speech thus concludes: "When the bill is brought forward in that House of which I am a member, I shall be at my post, ready to give it my most hearty and cordial"opposition? no-"support." But why do I alJude to this speech at all? Merely to show that if those who oppose the bill say to us, Who are you that propound it ?" and make our previous conduct a ground for rejecting it, through distrust of its authors, we have a right to reply to them with another question, and to ask, "Who are you that resist it, and what were your previous opinions regarding it ?"

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which was his expression; but when we mentioned our supposition that he really meant to go as far as to support a bill for the more effectual prevention of bribery at elections, the noble Lord told us he would do no such thing.

The Earl of Mansfield. I gave no opinion on the point.

The Lord Chancellor. Exactly so. The noble Lord reserves his opinion as to whether he would put down bribery, for two years and two days; and when they are expired, he, peradventure, may inform us whether he will give us leave to bring in a bill to prevent bribery; not all kinds of bribery-that would be radical work-but as far as the giving away of ribbons goes, leaving beer untouched, and agreeably to the venerable practice of the olden time.

petitions pro

Another noble Lord, a friend of mine, whose honesty and frankness stamp all he (4.) Lord says with still greater value than it de- Wicide. rives from mere talent [Lord Wharncliffe], would have you believe that all the peti- Denies that the Another noble Lord [Lord Mansfield] has ar- tions under which your table now estelar ala gued this question with great ability and show groans are indeed for reform, but not vor of the b of learning; and if we are to take him as our for this bill, which he actually says the people (3) Lord Mans guide, we must also look at the pan- dislike. Now is not this a droll way for the peo acea which he provides for us in case ple to act, if we are to take my noble friend's of rejection. That noble Lord, look-statement as true? First of all, it is an odd

held asks a delay of the question

for two years

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